Is Your Main Event Combustible?

Is your main event combustible?

It’s a distracting world, so many things pulling and pushing, so many demands and needs.

We tend to become waylaid as one thing competes with another until we’re rendered useless and just want to hit the couch or watch a movie or wander, stagnate, become a nobody.

There is no time for this.

How do we prioritize so we are free to act?

In this life you have an opportunity to become your most creative and expressive self. The ingredients are here to work with. No matter who you are, how you look, your age, your race, your heritage… this is your opportunity.

Find the top of your pyramid of priorities—the Main Event—and your actions will follow.

When I’m coaching actors and directors I notice there is often resistance to recognizing the Main Event in the story. There is a reason why the actor doesn’t want to see, confront, engage with something that is there… as if it is a pilgrimage to disaster. But it is a pilgrimage to the truth.

It is the same in our daily lives. Resistance makes our aim quiver and miss the mark.

But your Main Event is not negotiable.

Sort out what your Main Event is and make it your Main Objective.

Enter into your labyrinth of questions and confusions about what your true priority is in this life. As you do, watch yourself. Watch yourself making your way through the twists and turns, the dead ends—but continue… move through the tangles. Keep moving.

Entering this journey may bring fear. Great. That’s a good sign. It means you’re hitting a nerve and in those nerves is bottled up energy to use to break through, to identify the top of the pyramid, your overriding goal—to be living your Main Event.

Your main objective is the trajectory to your Main Event... one is the doing, the other is the receiving. Together they are combustible.

When you practice acting, you’re practicing life.

When you read a script tune into the main event.

It may be elusive. If you commit to the words, the details, the facts on the page there will be signals. The facts guide you and become touch points as you find your character’s direction, or as Uta Hagen put it, “destination,” a beautiful word that carries the meaning in the plot.

This is the Main Event embedded in the art form.

Go on your pilgrimage.

Make it a daily practice to focus on your Main Event before you head out into the day. It will clarify your objective, release your actions, and … you will be exercising Acting Technique.

Suddenly everything becomes cohesive once you discover the Main Event of your story. Once you know your target, you steady and center.

It is what makes your work solid and undeniable.

Join the class. Live out your Main Event.